


Chances of Indigo

by leiascully



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Radio, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 08:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/877522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The forecast may be coal dust, but Cecil always seems to believe in chances of indigo.  How Carlos stopped worrying and learned to love the host of Night Vale community radio.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chances of Indigo

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: spoilers for "One Year Later"  
> A/N: Kudos to all the brilliant writers out there who can replicate the feel of Night Vale. As for me, I'll write from Carlos' more comprehensible perspective. Not sure where this story came from or how it got so long or how, being as long as it is, it still didn't include half of all my feelings about these two. If anybody has a transcript of the end of "One Year Later", I'd love to see it.  
> Disclaimer: _Welcome to Night Vale_ and all related characters are the property of Joseph Fink, Jeffery Cranor, and Commonplace Books. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

The first time Carlos hears Cecil, he's sitting in his car. After setting up the lab, he went to Big Rico's for a slice of pizza, because it was right next door, and his team wasn't arriving until the evening. Every single person stared at him. Carlos wasn't uncomfortable being the center of attention - he wasn't the kind of scientist who stayed in his lab and never spoke to anybody - but many more interesting people were in the restaurant, including one who was ten feet tall and glowed faintly, and the cashier, whose voice echoed as if he were standing in an enormous stone chamber. Nobody introduced themselves or spoke to him, just gazed fixedly at his hair. He bought his slice and went out to his car and sat eating it, just like any normal person would do, if that normal person were overly involved in pondering the mysteries of the universe.

Well, he's a scientist. That seems to cover a multitude of sins. For someone whose job is observation, he's not quite ready to be observed himself, which reminds him of the time he ducked the advances of his first boyfriend for six months before realizing exactly what was happening, which was around the time that Mario, exasperated, grabbed him by the shoulders and confessed his attraction, to Carlos' shock and eventual delight. 

But that's ancient history, and this is science. Structured, precise science, where the processes are always reliable even when the results aren't. He has the feeling that the results won't be at all reliable here in Night Vale. For one thing, his equipment has been almost impossible to calibrate. He tested and retested all of it, with different results every time. For another thing, Big Rico's seems to be the only pizza place open in the entire town. That's just strange. It's a small town, but not so small that it couldn't support two pizza places. In Carlos' experience, the number of pizza places is usually _n_ \+ 3, where _n_ is the number of pizza places a town's population could reasonably support, and he's definitely never seen one marked "mandatory". But he's eating in his car, so what does he know?

It's getting hot, so he turns on the car and turns the air conditioning up. He was listening to the radio on the drive here, and he never turned it off. The speakers give out a strange sequence of crackles and pops that almost sounds like Morse code, but as soon as Carlos stops chewing on the strangely elastic cheese and starts to listen, the crackling stops and a program comes on.

"A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep," says a man's voice. It's a good voice. A nice smooth voice. A soothing voice, which is pleasant after the morning Carlos has had with his finicky equipment. He needs to figure out which hotel is least likely to contain any nasty unpredictable surprises. He didn't bring any books except what he needed for the lab, and he doubts that Night Vale will get great tv reception, so now at least there's this voice on the radio, and possibly Morse code. Maybe he'll buy a radio at Target while he's getting toiletries, so that he can listen in the relative comfort of his hotel room. 

The voice goes on about the new dog park where dogs aren't allowed and people aren't allowed, which seems to Carlos to be counterintuitive to the notion of a dog park, but hell, welcome to Night Vale, apparently. A friendly desert community where glowing giants stare at _him_ , as if Carlos is the outlier. Maybe he is. That's why he's here. Night Vale is an anomaly. There's nothing scientists love more than stubborn data points, and Night Vale's been a reliable source of them since he first noticed the number of strange reports coming from the same few square miles of desert. 

Carlos takes another bite of his pizza. The pepperoni slices make his lips tingle. The radio program goes on to the news, which apparently involves angels doing menial household chores. That doesn't seem to comport with most of Carlos' knowledge of angels, but being ten feet tall would help if you were changing a light bulb. The voice sounds utterly self-assured, as if this is something that happens every day. Carlos hopes so. He's been looking for Night Vale for months, fascinated by the strange events and the off-the-charts readings he's been sent. He's looking forward to unraveling the mysteries of Night Vale.

"A new man came into town today," says the voice. Carlos is only half listening, but the new man seems to have good hair and a nice coat. Carlos looks down. He was wearing a coat this morning against the chill. He's always liked that coat. But surely he's not the only new person in town. The voice says something about scientists, and then about Carlos' lab, and it's more than a little strange. Where did the voice see him? Was the voice in Big Rico's? Did someone else report him? Nobody's really spoken to him, and he hasn't reached out to anyone yet. It's odd to be under such scrutiny from unknown observers.

Still, the voice liked his coat. Strange or not, Carlos is a little bit flattered. Mostly creeped out by the way this town seems to keep tabs on its citizens, as if the very buildings have eyes and ears, but a very little bit flattered. The voice thinks his hair is perfect and beautiful. That's not a bad thing to hear, especially when you're potentially overly excited from the stress of moving across the country to a strange town in the middle of nowhere where bizarre things seem to be happening constantly and none of your equipment will yield usable data. It bolsters him a little. 

Carlos finishes his slice of pizza and drives to Target. He buys shampoo and conditioner (he has a reputation for perfect hair to keep up) and shaving cream and soap and all the other little items that he needs for his daily routines. He buys two books from the best seller rack, because they're 30 percent off. He buys a few clothes to supplement what he brought with him, since it was mostly lab equipment. And he buys a radio. He tells himself it's for weather emergencies, which are probably frequent in Night Vale. It's for the voice.

On the way back to the lab, he stops off and asks the city clerk for hotel advice. He finds the desk easily enough; he follows the sound of the voice, which is murmuring from a radio next to the bored clerk with the hollow eyes. The clerk issues him an Alert Citizen card and recommends the Holiday Inn Express, on the grounds that the Red Roof Inn has recently repainted its roof with the compulsory blood donations of those incarcerated in the abandoned mine shaft outside of town, and that tends to attract things that screech dire warnings in the early hours of the morning. 

"It'll be fine in a few weeks, but unless you're interested in waking in a cold sweat, shivering at the realization of your own mortality and your inability to make any lasting contribution to the meaningless series of events that we call life, you might, like, want to get a room at the Holiday Inn. And they have a complimentary continental breakfast and a better bloodstone circle. Uh, I guess I need to get your occupation so that I can put you on the register. You'll automatically be entered to win a tour of the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area."

Carlos nods, even though Night Vale is in the desert and there's no waterfront for hundreds of miles. "I'm a scientist."

"Like, who isn't?" the clerk mutters.

"I'm here to study Night Vale," Carlos tells him. 

The clerk scrutinizes him. "Your hair is _perfect_. You must be renting the lab next to Big Rico's."

"Yes," Carlos tells him. "Do you know the best way that I could advertise to the townspeople that I'd like their input for my research?"

"You could call a town hall meeting," the clerk says, marginally more interested, although the circles under his eyes only seem darker, and those eyes more haunted. "There's nothing happening at three."

"Then please put me down for three," Carlos says, keeping his voice pleasant. Now that people know he's here, they might as well know why he's here. (He steadfastly ignores the miniscule hint of a thought that perhaps the voice might attend.) He followed a trail of reports of strange occurrences and bizarre happenings. He sifted through skewed numbers and impossible readings. He posed the hypothesis that one town couldn't possibly be the site of so many off-the-charts results, but he's already sensed that he'll be revising his hypothesis. Night Vale is unique. 

Carlos checks in to the Holiday Inn Express and unpacks his belongings. He puts his new toiletries in the bathroom and sets his books on the night stand. He'll need to get an apartment soon, but for now, it's as homey as he can make it. He thinks about putting on his coat for the town hall meeting, but settles for rolling up his sleeves. It's too hot. 

The entire town seems to show up for the town meeting. Carlos has never seen so many blank stares in his entire life. An old woman brings corn muffins to the meeting - Old Woman Josie, Carlos thinks, because she keeps telling everyone how the angels took her salt. Carlos gives it a few minutes for everyone to settle down, although they don't take much settling - about half of the people just file in and take seats, gazing vaguely at the back of the chair in front of them. Only a few people even seem awake, and most of those are dressed in black and wearing sunglasses, standing at the back of the room, their faces impassive in a different way from the rest. Carlos breathes in and out and then takes the stage.

"Hello," he says, and in the face of all those glazed eyes, he's so glad that he did all that public speaking in college. "I'm Carlos. I think you probably heard about me on the radio this morning. I'm here to study Night Vale. Your town is probably the most scientifically interesting town in the country, maybe even the world. My team and I are here to establish the lab next to Big Rico's as a center for data collection and experimentation, to see if we can try to figure out what makes Night Vale so special." He grins at them, trying to rouse some sort of reaction. The crowd sighs, almost in unison. 

"Special," someone whispers. 

"Yes, special," Carlos tells them. "My team and I will be going around town in the next few days. We may ask questions. We may take measurements. It may not make sense to you. Rest assured that we only want to help." 

"Help," someone whispers, and starts to sob softly. "Help." The sobbing spreads through the crowd. A woman buries her face in her hands. The black-suited agents in the back of the room murmur into their cuffs.

Carlos takes questions. Old Woman Josie asks him to retrieve her salt and wants to know if he liked the muffins. Carlos assures her that he did and he will. Someone else asks if he's seen the clock tower. Carlos says he hasn't, but he's looking forward to it. The speaker frowns. None of the people who end up asking questions are the voice. Carlos tries not to be disappointed. He goes back to his lab to wait for his team. Somehow, he managed to leave the radio in his car instead of putting it in his hotel room. He takes it into the lab with him and turns it on.

The voice is talking about the town meeting. Carlos pretends not to listen, running diagnostics on his equipment, but he can't help straining to catch the words when he's across the room. 

"I fell in love **instantly** ," the voice says, and Carlos' heart thuds once, just once. For a half-second, it's romantic, and then it's creepy. Carlos knows he has his charms, but not so many charms that a voice like that should fall in love at first sight. Especially not with a man who has teeth like a military cemetery. _White rows stretching on without end, in memoriam of all our lost hopes and dreams_ , narrates Carlos' brain in the radio's voice, and Carlos blinks to clear his thoughts.

The seismograph catches his eye, and Carlos discovers that his steady world is in a process of constant upheaval. Somehow, it seems appropriate.

\+ + + + 

By the next morning, his team is there. They take a tour of the town and discover that one of the houses is simply not there. Carlos brought a few gadgets, just to show his fellow scientists that Night Vale is the mecca of oddness, and he hands them out to his team. After about five minutes, one of his team notices that her instrument isn't displaying any reading at all for a particular house, to all appearances the same as the houses to either side of it. They all try their instruments. The house won't produce a reading on any of them, and it can't be viewed through a camera lens, despite the fact that every other house in the subdivision is perfectly normal. 

He's sure they look like fools, standing out on the sidewalk, trying to summon up the courage to actually approach the house. Especially since the house seems to be there, seems to be intact, seems to be completely unremarkable aside from the fact that it can't be there. It has a mailbox, which is actually there, and a sidewalk, which ceases to exist about halfway along its length, and a garage which could hold two cars if it were, in fact, part of reality. But it isn't, and it's all very inexplicable. None of the scientists will leave the safe, reliably-in-existence square of sidewalk under their feet.

Eventually they give up and grab lunch. 

Subway sandwiches aren't usually branded with strange runes, and he's never noticed that their coffee was guaranteed bloodstone-free. Carlos bites into his sandwich and discovers it has Nutella on it, which doesn't exactly go with pastrami. He doesn't remember ordering Nutella, or ever seeing it at Subway. The runes scorched into the bread set off a ringing in his ears. The tobacco cookies aren't any good either. Maybe he's better off sticking to mandatory slices at Big Rico's. His team seem to be too stunned to notice. Carlos eats quickly. 

He gets his team established, a few in the lab and most of them out at the monitoring station out by Route 800, looking at the readings coming from the seismograph. They take readings all afternoon, putting the numbers into the computers. The computers produce graphs and charts and none of them make any sense. One of the spreadsheets prints out covered in question marks. Another of the charts starts leaking. The ink just runs off the page. Carlos mops it up with a paper towel and tries again. This time, the graph prints off fine, but the legend says "Sparrows, interminable talk shows, turquoise-taupe", despite the fact that the file is fine. They work through dinner - someone goes over and gets Big Rico's slices for everyone - and then the sun goes down at the wrong time. 

"Boss?" says one of his scientists. "Time's being weird."

"Everything's weird here," Carlos says. 

"But the sun's going down at the wrong time," the scientist insists.

The sun is definitely going down at the wrong time. The scientist calls the radio and the papers. The paper doesn't seem interested. Carlos pretends he's not trying to overhear the conversation with the radio. They all sit around, staring at the clock on his desk, checking against their watches, the weather report, the almanac, and the sun itself, which is stubbornly visible eight minutes after it was supposed to have set, and it can't just be the flat, featureless desert landscape that makes the sun seem to linger interminably, hovering above the horizon like a baleful orange eye that watches you and it knows what you've done, it will always know and it will never tell. But it lingers so that you will never forget exactly what it knows. 

Carlos makes a note and tries to stop hearing the voice. Day One, and already he's got so much to investigate. He picks up the radio (in case of weather emergency, of course) and one of his instruments, which has been beeping steadily since he arrived in town, and sets off in his car to the radio station. There's a lot of background radiation in the area. He's noticed that the closer he goes to the radio station (easily identified by the sign outside), the louder his instrument beeps. For reasons he doesn't want to bother thinking about (romance, stalkers, how long it's been since he's had either), he wants to investigate this himself. 

"Hello," says an intern as he walks in. "Are you Carlos, the scientist? Your hair is _perfect_."

"Yes," Carlos mumbles, distracted by the wildly flailing needle on his instrument. He does notice that they don't seem to have a phone, so who did his team call? "I'm Carlos. I need to take some readings."

"Right this way!" the intern chirps in a cheery, very slightly strained voice. "We're so honored to have you with us."

And then Carlos is in the studio, where there is still no phone. The voice is there, smiling at him, his eyes a little less haunted than everyone else's.

" _Carlos_ ," the voice says. "It's so good to meet you _at last_."

"I've only been here since yesterday," Carlos says. He can't even make sense of the readings he's getting. At these levels, none of them should be chatting casually. They should be on the floor, too weak to move, but instead the voice is just sitting there with a warm look on his face. It isn't a handsome face, but it isn't a bad face. The voice, now that Carlos takes a moment to look at him, is an average man: tallish, thinnish, his hair brownish and his eyes greyish. It's no wonder Carlos couldn't pick him out of the crowd at the town hall meeting. The most exceptional thing about him is clearly his voice, and maybe the liveliness of those greyish eyes. 

"I'm Cecil," the voice says, and his handshake is firm. His hand is warm and smooth, his fingers moderately pale against Carlos' much darker ones. "It's _wonderful_ to see you. Has anyone ever told you how marvelous the line of your jaw is? It's so _square_ and so perfect."

"Yes," Carlos says, "I mean, no." The machine beeps insistently in his hands. There must be some kind of material here in the studio producing the radiation.

"To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?" Cecil asks. "And I assure you, Carlos, it is a _pleasure_." His voice caresses the word in a way that Carlos would find distracting, if he weren't already distracted. 

"I'm looking for materials," Carlos says, glancing around the studio. Everything looks normal, or at least shabby-normal, except the microphone, which looks frankly ancient. He isn't even sure why or how it works. He aims his instrument at the microphone and the needle flails again. The closer he gets to the microphone, the more his instrument chirps and beeps. 

"It certainly is noisy," Cecil says, admiration in his voice. 

Cecil should be too weak to speak, with these levels. Carlos himself should be crawling toward the door. But he doesn't feel anything out of the ordinary, except a rising sense of panic, and Cecil is smiling as if Carlos has given him some kind of gift. 

"Would you mind doing an interview?" Cecil asks.

Carlos stares at him. "No, thanks. You should leave."

"Why would I ever leave?" Cecil asks, beaming. "There is still so much to say."

"We should all leave," Carlos insists. "You should evacuate the building. You should leave immediately. The intern, too."

"Oh, _Carlos_ ," Cecil says. "You are so thoughtful to come here and tell us that. Please feel free to come back any time. Or, if you don't like the studio, here's my number. I'm generally available in case you want to do an interview. Or coffee. Or dinner. Or anything, really. I'd be honored to show you the best that Night Vale has to offer a handsome visitor like yourself." He holds out a card.

Cecil is remarkably creepy and remarkably sweet at the same time. Carlos takes the card and slips it into his pocket. The instrument is almost shrieking in his hand. He moves it away from the microphone and the chirping quiets a little. The levels are still staggeringly high. Carlos leaves as quickly as he can. He's too exhausted to go back to the lab, so he takes the instrument back to his hotel room, where its beeping has settled to a frequency that's bearable. He sets it on the air conditioner. The radio goes on his bedside table. He'll need to be able to hear it in case of weather emergency, after all. Given that the town is experiencing unreal houses and intangible earthquakes, a weather event isn't out of the realm of possibility. He showers quickly and slips between the sheets of the bed, first following the advice of the hotel guide and checking for any ethereal sprites or puppies (there are none). He turns on the radio. 

"And now, the weather," says Cecil, but it isn't the weather after all, at least not any kind of weather Carlos has ever heard before. 

He falls asleep listening to the smooth murmur of Cecil's voice. He dreams of the void. 

\+ + + +

Another day, another twenty revelations. Another hundred impossibilities. Another long afternoon of listening to Night Vale community radio as they test and retest. His team says nothing, but every once in a while, Carlos catches them sharing a knowing look, or a fearful one. Carlos moves out of the hotel and into an apartment. Another day, another week, another month. It is always cold at night and hot as soon as the sun comes up. The numbers never make sense. Nothing ever makes sense. 

Night Vale is strange and worrying. The longer Carlos is there, the stranger and more worrying it seems. He has always been an easy-going person; now he finds himself looking over his shoulder, his breath coming fast, as if he's looking for something that always lingers just out of sight. The most strange and worrying thing is how normal that comes to seem, as if he has always known there was something following. Something unknowable. Something inescapable. 

The only sane thing about Night Vale is Cecil's community radio program, which doesn't make any sense. "Welcome To Night Vale" sounds more like a horror serial than a news show, especially after Carlos gets his hair cut and Cecil will only say the barber's name in a sinister tone. Carlos still can't get to sleep without listening to it, despite the fairly frequent embarrassment when Cecil begins to rhapsodize again about Carlos' hair or his jaw or his voice. Sometimes, especially at first, Carlos wishes he could stop listening, but he can't. He needs Cecil's voice to hypnotize him, to reassure him that all of this is ordinary and manageable, especially now that the walls of his apartment have started glowing and, occasionally, oozing. (A short chat with his neighbors usually clears things up for a few weeks.) Eventually, he stops feeling embarrassed, unless his team is around, though he knows they're all equally enthralled by the radio. By Cecil. By the way Cecil's voice reworks the horrors of the day into some sort of fairy tale dream, where the witch follows Hansel and Gretel's trail of breadcrumbs but somehow it will all work out. The forecast may be coal dust, but Cecil always seems to believe in chances of indigo. It's just another beautiful evening in Night Vale, listeners, nothing to fear. 

Cecil's fascination for him is just another part of Night Vale, like the Whispering Forest or the lights over the Arby's. Cecil loves everything in Night Vale. It makes sense in a way that he should love Carlos. In a way, it's gratifying. Carlos has been too busy to feel handsome for quite a long time. It's nice. Sometimes, dozing, he'll catch his name ( _perfect_ Carlos, _sweet_ Carlos, _beautiful_ Carlos), and he turns over in his half-sleep and puts his hand on the empty pillow next to his. 

He knows that he's become a real citizen of Night Vale when he starts thinking of things with their signifiers, like Larry Leroy, out of the edge of town, and Desert Bluffs, for shame, and when he experiences the urge to glare at Steve Carlsburg, who has never wronged Carlos himself. When he ends up with imp nymphs in his Pinkberry instead of Oreo crumbs, he spoons them carefully into an empty container to take back to the lab rather than fleeing the establishment. He doesn't think about the dog park (except when he can't help it). He can identify the unmarked helicopters with relative ease. The ghost cars don't distract him. He's even nearly mastered the town moan, which it's compulsory to repeat every uncanceled Wednesday at noon. 

Night Vale never gets any less strange. But it feels more like home, with Cecil cheerfully narrating the town bulletin. Carlos marks off the seasons by the rivalries against Desert Bluffs: football, basketball, esoteric charms, desert survival, baseball, competitive intergenerational curses, ancestral soccer, track and field, out-of-body pickleball. Carlos avoids having gills surgically applied. He eats his mandatory slices at Big Rico's, even when wheat and wheat by-products are banned. Life goes on in lovably byzantine Night Vale, and somehow it is both lovable and byzantine, charming and horrifying in equal parts. The night Carlos ends up in the library is one of the most terrifying of his entire life, but he does end up with a few good novels.

More than half the town can't feel pain. Most of the time, the ground should be bucking under their feet, and yet Carlos and all the rest of them walk on quiet streets. It has been nearly a year, and Carlos and his team are no closer to solving any of their questions. In fact, there are more and more questions. The mysteries are endless, much like the void that fills the sky. 

The only mystery he could solve is the one he won't acknowledge not acknowledging, not even when he and Cecil have coffee and Cecil gazes at him with fond greyish eyes full of hope. Carlos says nothing that isn't about science. Cecil says nothing that isn't about Night Vale and doesn't have to; his eyes and his hands say it all. The way he holds his spoon is particularly eloquent. Carlos never believed that instantly could last forever, but it seems to be going strong. 

He never stops worrying for Night Vale. It's comforting to know, night after night, that Cecil is worrying along with him, and celebrating too. Carlos leaves it at that, and his body curves around the space in his bed left for memories. If he dreams sometimes of possibilities as the time slips by, if his fingers trail over his own skin in rhythm with the cadence of Cecil's voice, these are secrets the night keeps as it holds vigil over the town. 

\+ + + +

The night that Carlos goes down to the city under the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, he doesn't know what he's expecting. Not a miniature city. Not miniature people who attack him viciously. Not lying bleeding between miniature buildings with small people swarming over him and even smaller hope of being saved. Not for his thoughts, as he's bleeding, to turn to Cecil. 

_Cecil_. Not handsome. Not tactful. But perfect. Cecil, who has wooed him patiently night after night for an entire year in the only way he seems to know how. It hasn't been suave and it hasn't been subtle and it hasn't always been what Carlos wanted to hear on a given night, but at least it's been honest. In a town where nothing is certain, Cecil has always been there. Carlos can't remember him missing a broadcast. Every night, he was there, speaking into the void. He put his heart on the radio waves and waited, and Carlos never even gave him a sign. Brave Cecil. Kind Cecil. Faithful Cecil. 

If Carlos gets out of this, he's changing things.

Carlos isn't sure that the apparition he sees is the Apache tracker (that white guy with the cartoonishly offensive headdress who got transformed into an actual Native American who only speaks Russian but whom nobody likes anyway), not until the apparition picks him up and throws him over his shoulder and Carlos has a bunch of plastic feathers in his face. He wonders vaguely if the Apache tracker can feel pain. He hopes not. The miniature people are vicious. And still the thing that hurts most is his heart. 

Everything is a blur. Carlos is aware that he's still losing blood. He's aware when the attacks cease. He's aware when someone pulls him away and he can no longer feel the plastic feathers. The bright lights are the ambulance; the buzzing cold is the hospital, where they clean him up a bit and bandage the worst of his wounds. As soon as they let him use his phone, Carlos calls Cecil, the private number he's never used that has been in his phone for months. The only place he can think to meet is the Arby's parking lot. At least they'll have the lights to watch. At least they'll have each other.

Cecil shows up with his eyes so full of relief and hope and yes, oh yes, _love_ that Carlos can barely keep it together. It's been a hell of a night. He's weary and aching and his heart is so full that it hurts. He has so much to say, and yet he can say so little of it. He doesn't have words to contain his new knowledge. He can only speak simple truths that bend around the main truth the way light bends around a distant planet. It's enough just to rest his hand on Cecil's thigh. It's enough to have Cecil's head resting sweetly on his shoulder. 

The lights dart through the sky. They sit on the trunk of Carlos' ridiculous hybrid coupe, and all that matters is that they're together. In the desert night, something is blooming, as terrifying as it is beautiful, and tomorrow the sun will rise on a world with something new in it.


End file.
